THE BE$T NEW$ MONEY CAN BUY

[defrog]

ITEM: Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined, according to Michael Massing at the Columbia Journalism Review:

Couric’s salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news.

Cue a dissection of the skewed priorities of network TV news budgets.

To be fair, I’m reasonably radio news can be done on a lower budget than television news, so the comparison may be unfair.

Still, it’s an interesting stat, and a point worth making – especially at a time where most people distrust journalism unless it’s from Fox News or Jon Stewart.

But you knew that.

Howard Beale was right,

This is dF